The scientific community is
slowly but surely working towards the creation of fully autonomous mobile
robots capable of interacting with the proverbial real world. To operate in the
real world, autonomous robots rely on their sensory information, but the
ability to accurately sense the complex world is still missing.Visual input, in the form of color images
from a camera, should be an excellent and rich source of such information, considering
the significant amount of progress made in machine vision. But color, and
images in general, have been used sparingly on mobile robots, where people have
mostly focused their attention on other sensors such as tactile sensors, sonar
and laser.

This talk presents the
challenges raised and solutions introduced in our efforts to create a robust,
color-based visual system for the Sony Aibo robot.We enable the robot to learn its color map
autonomously and demonstrate a degree of illumination invariance under changing
lighting conditions.Our contributions
are fully implemented and operate in real time within the limited processing
resources available onboard the robot.The
system has been deployed in periodic robot soccer competitions, enabling teams
of four Aibo robots to play soccer as a part of the international RoboCup
initiative.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Peter Stone is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
and Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas
at Austin.He received his Ph.D in Computer Science in
1998 from CarnegieMellonUniversity.From 1999 to 2002 he was a Senior Technical
Staff Member in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at
AT&T Labs - Research.Peter's research
interests include machine learning, multiagent systems, robotics, and
e-commerce.In 2003, he won a CAREER
award from the National Science Foundation for his research on learning agents
in dynamic, collaborative, and adversarial multiagent environments.In 2004, he was named an ONR Young
Investigator for his research on machine learning on physical robots.Most recently, he was awarded the
prestigious IJCAI 2007 Computers and Thought award.